Word: torpedo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Gris Nez, France, last week 22-year-old Thomas Blower, Nottingham factory hand, slathered himself with grease, slid into the chill water of the English Channel. Plowing the waves like a torpedo, he swam eleven miles in five hours, was four miles off the Dover breakwater in nine hours, met a strong southwesterly tide and was three hours covering the next two miles, finally waded ashore between Dover and Folkestone after 13 hr. 29 min. Twenty-third to complete the channel swim, Blower was 2 hr. 45 min. slower than the Bohemian mechanic, Venceslas Spacek, who set the record...
...zigzagging. A submarine needed only 15 seconds to let go with a "tin fish." Tales about previous submarine victims did not help to relax the nerves any. The first attack came at night, in a grey light that made a submarine invisible except for a dim white ripple. The torpedoes missed by a hair. When an oily patch showed where the submarine had been, the five-inch guns on the Baton Rouge stopped firing. The captain's big grin marked the hits. Occasionally they picked up a few survivors from a torpedoed boat ahead. Armed guard duty, which consisted...
Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath, a diplomat of the old regime and no Nazi hothead, who was coming to London last week. The pro-German clique in Mayfair was purring. Anthony Eden had plucked up courage to ignore wholly unproved German charges that a Leftist Spanish torpedo or submarine had "grazed and dented" the German cruiser Leipzig. Finally, the German Ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, extremely unpopular in London, was supposed to have been only bluffing when he demanded, a few days prior, that Britain and France join Germany and Italy in staging a mighty four-power naval demonstration...
Black as caviar was the shore with crowds squinting through telescopes, among them what British police admitted was the largest collection of foreign spies and counterspies ever to attend a British function. Of the British ships in line they were particularly anxious to see the new fast torpedo-carrying motor boats, the square-sterned anti-submarine net-layers Protector and Guardian and the antiaircraft ships, Coventry and Curlew. Old light cruisers about ready to be decommissioned, these ships have had, their superstructures swept clear and their decks jammed with batteries of the very latest electrophonic anti-aircraft guns and high...
...Almeria the British destroyer Hunter, on patrol duty, hit or was hit by something that pushed in her bow, killed eight British seamen, wounded 14. Was it a mine, or was it, as Almeria fishermen are said to have insisted, a torpedo from a German submarine whose periscope had been observed? International complications from this might be so grave that British admiralty officials "suggested," even before a committee of inquiry was constituted, that the Hunter had hit a mine. With great secrecy the Hunter, bow awash, was towed stern foremost into Gibraltar, locked in a closely-guarded drydock, where gold...